War and Pax

Claude Rawson

• War Music. An Account of Books 16 to 19 of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ by Christopher Logue
  Cape, 83 pp, £3.95, May 1981, ISBN 0 224 01534 6
• Ode to the Dodo. Poems from 1953 to 1978 by Christopher Logue
  Cape, 176 pp, £6.95, May 1981, ISBN 0 02 240196 2
• Under the North Star by Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin
  Faber, 47 pp, £5.95, April 1981, ISBN 0 571 11721 X
• Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe by Ekbert Faas
  Black Swallow Press, 229 pp, June 1983, ISBN 0 87685 459 5
• Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes by Stuart Hirschberg
  Wolfhound, 239 pp, £8.50, April 1981, ISBN 0 905473 50 7
• Ted Hughes: A Critical Study by Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts
  Faber, 288 pp, £9.50, April 1981, ISBN 0 571 11701 5

Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a translation’s merit should be judged by ‘its effect as an English poem’, since Johnson was talking about translations, whereas Logue’s poem is a variety of ‘poetical imitation’ and belongs to a perfectly good tradition of English poems based on or played off against an older (often Classical) original. A modern model might be Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, which it resembles in its style of selective ironic commentary and in some Poundian mannerisms, as in the jeering lyricism of the scene where Thetis calls together her sister Nereids, ‘kith of King Nayruce’ (Nereus).